“Not at all,” said DuSchwezel. “We have discussed no business, and nothing that’s gone between us could be construed as a binding verbal contract. Go to your bank and cash the check if you want. I’ll wait here. Or I can come back. Do this in whichever way makes you feel comfortable.”
“If,” I said, “I decide to write you that check, what’s the other shoe? I don’t need a lawyer.”
“You probably do, but that’s a general opinion based on your lifestyle.”
“You fucking with me?”
He grinned. “Of course.”
I grinned too. Mine was forced.
“If you accept my check,” I said, “and suddenly become my lawyer, is there more of this?”
“That would be when the other shoe would hit the floor, yes,” he admitted.
“Will I like it?”
He pursed his lips. “I doubt it.”
“Then—?”
“But really, Mr. Hunter, how many of your more interesting cases have you actually liked?”
I said nothing.
“You have quite a reputation in certain circles,” said DuSchwezel. “People respect you.”
“No,” I said, “they don’t.”
He shrugged. “Okay, then they respect what you can do. They fear you, if that’s a better way to put it.”
“Not sure there is a better way to put it if we’re both talking about the same thing.”
“Fair enough,” he said.
We sat there for a moment. My office smells like Lysol and Jack Daniel’s. The two smells are related thematically in ways that define me, sad to say. The Lysol for cleaning up some of the messes I’ve had to make. The Jack Daniel’s for helping me try to forget. Cliché? Sure. Fuck it.
DuSchwezel sat back and crossed his legs. Even through the stink of booze and cleaning products, I could smell him. I have a very good sense of smell. Better than yours unless you’re like me. He’d used some kind of superfatted soap, probably Camay. His shampoo is scented with tea-tree oil. Cologne was one of the Polo varieties. Blue, I think. Deodorant was Old Spice Sport. There was a hint of chlorine about him, which suggested he swam his laps today and showered at the gym. There was also a subtle aroma of something else. No, two things. A little fear sweat and a little blood. Hard to wash those away completely. Hound dogs can sniff them after a shower. So can people like me.
I opened my desk drawer, took out my cheap green checkbook, and wrote him a check for one hundred dollars. He watched me with genuine and obvious interest, then accepted it with a nod. DuSchwezel took a moment to study it, though I think he did that to collect his thoughts. There were a few beads of fresh sweat on his forehead. Then he folded the check and tucked it into an inner pocket of his jacket.
We sat for a moment.
“Anything we discuss from here out is protected,” he said.
“Yup.” In the movies and in poorly researched novels, private investigators often hide information from the cops by claiming client confidentiality. Yeah, that’s a myth. Only lawyers and shrinks get that protection. Now we were sealed and square.
“Mr. Hunter,” said DuSchwezel, “I would like very much for you to kill someone.”
-2-
So, yeah, okay. That just happened.
I sat there, looking at him. I think I was smiling. Or something.
His face was slightly flushed.
“You’re fucking with me,” I said.
“Actually,” said DuSchwezel, “I’m not.”
“Then give me back my check and try not to take it personally while I throw you the fuck out of my office. I may knee you in the balls, but that’s just a professional courtesy.”
“This isn’t a joking matter,” he said.
My smile got wider and probably stranger. “Sounds like it to me.”
DuSchwezel’s smile faded away. “Do I look like I’m joking, Mr. Hunter?”
“You’d better be. You just asked me to commit a contract killing.”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“I’m pretty sure that I don’t give a flying gopher fuck how simple or complicated it is,” I said. “And, tell you what, why don’t you stand up and assume the position so I can make sure you’re not wearing a wire. Entrapment is an ugly word and it’ll probably hurt when I shove it up your ass.”
I started to get out of my chair, but he stood up more quickly, hands raised as he backed away.
“No! Listen to me, please. If you want to pat me down, that’s fine, but please listen to me.”
“Pat first, listen later. Hands against the wall.”
Before he could react, I snaked out a hand, caught him by the shoulder of his eleven thousand–dollar suit, spun him, and slammed him into the wall, kicked his legs wide, and frisked him. Before I was a P.I. here in Philly, I was a cop in Minneapolis. I worked enough vice cases in my day to know how to check someone for a wire. There are nice ways to do it, and there are ways that can really fuck up a person’s month. I went somewhere in the middle. When I was done, his clothes were a mess, he had very little personal dignity left, he was panting with mingled fear and anger, but he was clean.
I pointed to the chair. “Sit,” I ordered. He sat and watched while I rifled through his briefcase. Lots of file folders, which I ignored, but nothing else. I took a tuning fork from my desk drawer—a little trick I learned from a cop friend in Pine Deep—banged it hard and touched it to the handle and any part of the briefcase dense enough to conceal a mic. If anyone was listening in, they’d be shopping at Miracle-Ear by the end of the day.
The case was clean.
So, I sat on the edge of my desk, arms folded, and looked down at DuSchwezel. He plucked out his pocket square and dabbed his forehead and upper lip.
“You’re an asshole,” he said.
“Blow me,” I said. “Tell me why I shouldn’t throw you out the window.”
DuSchwezel held the pocket square in his lap, and I could see his hands tremble. Son of bitch was scared, but I don’t think it was because of me.
“People think that when you’re rich, you can do anything you want,” he said, coming at this from around a corner. “That’s not true. Not really. Sure, there are things we can do, and things we can get away with, but we’re not invulnerable. Everyone has a weakness, Mr. Hunter.”
I said nothing.
He looked up at me. “I am not a very nice person.”
“I’m not your therapist.”
“No,” he said, “I’m not looking for understanding. I am a bad man. I do bad things.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not a priest, either.”
“I’m not seeking absolution,” said DuSchwezel. “I’m making a statement. This is confidential and I need you to understand who and what I am. I represent very rich people in the Philadelphia area. People who use my services and those of my partners to make sure that the law always bends to whatever angle they need. I am a magician when it comes to twisting regulations, soliciting illegal compliance from judges and politicians, dispensing bribes, and hiding large amounts of cash in dummy corporations. In short, I facilitate corruption in virtually every way that does not involve direct violence.”
“Well, to be fair,” I said, “I already thought you were an asshole when you said you were a lawyer. This doesn’t slide you that much further down the crapper.”
“This isn’t about me,” he said, “this is about my daughter, Olivia. Beautiful girl. Smart.”
I said nothing.
Two tears suddenly dropped down his cheeks, and whatever was left of his professional calm and poise collapsed like broken scaffolding, dragged down by the weight of why he was really here. He said, “She was eighteen.”
Ah . . . fuck.
Was is such an ugly word.
When it’s laid against the age of a daughter, a kid, it’s beyond horrible. It disfigures the moment.
Mr. DuSchwezel put his face in his hands and began to cry.
I did not pat him on the back and tell him that it was ok
ay, that it was all going to be okay. I’m not that much of an asshole, and I had no reason to lie to him. Whatever this was, it was already not okay. She was eighteen. No, it wasn’t ever going to be okay.
I went around to my side of the desk, sat down, let him cry. Waited. Tried not to own any of his hurt. Tried really hard.
She was eighteen.
Was.
Goddamn it.
-3-
He got his shit together and told me the story. It was long and he rambled. Short version is this. . . .
One of the biggest clients he represented was a man named Fenner, and Mr. Fenner made his money by providing transportation, storage, and distribution for large lots of stolen merchandise. We’re not talking a couple of microwaves that fell off the back of a truck. We’re talking about entire trucks, or at least the cargoes of trucks that are hauling either illegal freight like untaxed cigarettes and unstamped booze, or the contents of hijacked trucks. There’s a lot of money in that. One of his specialties was stealing the contents of cargo containers at the docks and placing them in his own cans elsewhere in the same freight-yard. And he made sure that his stuff always had the proper paperwork. Lots of steps to his organization, lots of checks and balances, lots of money for everyone involved. Tens of millions per year, just in the dockyard scams. Twice that much for stuff he hauled up from meth labs in the south.
Mr. Fenner wasn’t the problem.
His son, Erik, was.
Erik was so cliché, I almost laughed as DuSchwezel described him. Twentysomething, good-looking, perfect teeth, deep-water tan from spending so much time on boats off Miami, rich, arrogant, vicious, petty, grabby, violent, charming, and all of the other adjectives that describe a child of wealth and power who was the only heir to a crime fortune. You can order the cocksucker from central casting. You know the type, the kind who genuinely believe that the world exists to help him get high, get laid, and have fun. The kind who drops twenty grand on a weekend out with his friends and won’t let anyone else pay for anything, because he needs to be seen as the one who owns the fun and has everything covered. And because his dad is who he is, doors get opened, he never waits in a line, he always gets a table, he gets more ass than a porn star, everyone grins at him like he’s the king of the jungle, and to that crowd, he is the king of the jungle. But what they’re really doing is kissing his ass in order to kiss his father’s ass.
Like I said, you’ve seen this a million times. Every single grade-B cop movie, every modern gangster movie, blah blah blah. In those movies, he’s the one who usually does something so heinous that it causes the action hero to cut a bloody swath through the criminal empire his father has taken so long to build.
The thing that really torques my ass, though, is that this particular cliché is reinforced by the fact that there are hundreds of real-world assholes exactly like that. Maybe thousands. I ran into some of them when I was a cop in the Cities, and I’ve brushed up against a few—even dented one or two—since I hung out a shingle here in Philly.
Unfortunately, they are usually very well guarded, and their asshole parents do everything they can to spoil them and enable the very worst behavior. In the movies, the action hero goes in guns blazing and does some chop-socky and racks up a body count that makes cancer look like a third-string killer with no running game.
That’s the movies. Liam Neeson, Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves, Bruce Willis, and Jason Statham manage to outfight and outgun whole mobs of wiseguys. That, as they say, is Hollywood. The bullets aren’t real, the bad guys in those flicks can’t shoot worth a damn, and heroes seem to be able to do complex, extended fight scenes even after taking gunshot wounds, stab wounds, falling off balconies, getting thrown through plate glass windows, and getting wailed on by fists, elbows, and feet. Special effects, baby. Fake blood, rubber knives, stunt men, and guns firing blanks.
I pointed all of this out to Mr. DuSchwezel.
“And so I came to you,” he said simply.
“Sure. But why? Last time I checked, there was a shit-ton of cops in Philadelphia. They’ve organized now. Call themselves a ‘police department.’ Maybe, you being a lawyer and all, you’ve heard of them.”
“I’m a mob lawyer,” he said.
“And you told me you have connections out the wazoo. Judges in your pocket and such.”
“Whose money do you think pays for those judges, Mr. Hunter? If I filed a formal complaint against Erik Fenner, who do you think would enforce it? Even I don’t know who owns whom in this town. Erik’s father has other lawyers, too. We don’t share all of the details about bribery and corruption while we braid each other’s hair.”
“There’s that,” I conceded. “You’re afraid that leveling charges against Erik will backfire.”
“I have two other children,” said DuSchwezel. “And a wife, a mother, cousins, nieces, nephews. Just in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, there are over twenty members of my extended family. How many of them do you think Mr. Fenner would hurt or kill to protect his only son?”
“Balls,” I said.
“Do you think I’d come to you if I had anywhere else to go?”
Not sure if he was trying to be deliberately insulting, but what the hell. He had a point. And besides, I was still thinking of him as Mr. Douche-weasel.
“What’s all this have to do with Olivia?”
Even though this was why he was here, my question hit him like a punch. He cleared his throat and said, “You spend a lot of time at Heaven Street Diner.”
A statement, not a question, but I nodded anyway.
“Do you remember a dark-haired girl who worked there for a few weeks last fall?”
“Sure. Livvie something.”
And something went clunk inside my head. Livvie. Short for Olivia.
“Oh,” I said. “Fuck.”
“Yes. Livvie was always troubled. She ran away from home half a dozen times. Last fall, she got a fake ID that said she was nineteen, and she moved into a roach-infested apartment near the diner. Got a job working tables at Heaven Street.”
“I remember her,” I said. It was true. Livvie was a pretty little thing. Thin, pale, rocking a goth look. Never said much and I don’t think she ever waited on me. When I was at the diner, the counter waitress, Ivy, always took care of me. Ivy and I go way back. “She seemed like a nice kid.”
It was a lame comment but it was all I had. I doubt we ever swapped more than a “hello” two or three times. Like a lot of diner staff, she came and went and then was gone from my memory until today.
“I had another investigator look for her,” said DuSchwezel. “He found her and brought her home.”
“But she ran away again?”
“In a way. I had a party at my house and the Fenners were there. Erik saw Olivia, and I could tell right away she fell for him. He’s very good-looking, and he wears his father’s money like a suit.”
I nodded, knowing the type.
“They started seeing each other,” he said. “I tried to warn her off, to tell her that he was dangerous, but . . .”
“But that probably made her more interested.”
“Yes.”
“Aside from the obvious, why was Erik dangerous? I mean, you took a risk telling her, when if she was so into him, she might have told him what you said.”
His hands still gripped the pocket square. Twisting it, clutching it with white-knuckled fingers. His eyes kept meeting mine and falling away. Over and over.
“Okay,” I said, “you’re not paying me enough to play games. Tell me what it is or buzz off.”
He took a fortifying breath and said, “There are rumors about Erik.”
“Ah, boy. . . . Tell me.”
“Erik is into some strange stuff. His father told me about some of it because he knew I was having some issues with Olivia. His father wanted advice on finding a good therapist.”
“When you say ‘strange’ . . . ?”
“Erik was into supernatural stuff.”
“No,” said DuSchwezel, “not as a hobbyist. I’m not talking about him being into monster movies and Stephen King novels. No, I mean he was into the supernatural. He believes in it. He . . . sought it out.”
“How and in what way?”
Again his eyes flicked away. “I’m not sure how it started. He’s always had unusual friends, particularly another boy whose father is with the Kirikov family. Do you know them? Russian Mafiya.”
“They’re dead, right? Turf war over the uptick in the heroin trade between here and New York. Both sides killing family members?”
“That was the cover story, sure. But it went deeper than that. I’m pretty sure that the Kirikov boy was not killed by their rivals in that particular line of commerce. I’m almost certain that Erik killed him and made it look like it was done by the rivals of the Kirikov family. The resulting drug war was the usual escalation of payback.”
“Why would Erik do that?”
“Because he needed a blood sacrifice.”
I stared at him. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”
“I . . . don’t have all of it together,” he admitted. “And, quite frankly, I’m not even sure how much of it I believe. But I managed to put someone inside Erik’s circle of friends. A promising attorney right out of law school who looks younger than he is. He ingratiated himself into Erik’s crew and . . .” He stopped and shivered. Actually shivered. “He said that Erik is insane. Erik doesn’t just want to be like his father; he wants to eclipse the old man and become something much bigger, something much more powerful. He wants to be feared.”
“He has a lot of thugs who will shoot people if he asks. Pretty sure he’s already feared.”
“No,” said DuSchwezel, “you don’t get it. This isn’t the kind of power-hunger I see all the time among my clients and their sons. No. When I said Erik was insane, I meant it. I think that he was crazy—clinically psychotic—to begin with, but the more he got into whatever supernatural stuff the young Kirikov shared with him . . . well, I think it pushed him into a whole new shape. Mentally, I mean.”
“So, he’s making blood sacrifices now? To whom? Or to what?”
What the #@&% Is That? Page 22